Original Discipline: Business / Supply Chain Management
The Student Struggle
Students may understand the individual components of a business operation but struggle to anticipate how uncertainty and unexpected disruptions affect an interconnected system.
They may assume that a well-designed process will operate as planned or focus on solving a single problem without considering how that decision affects other parts of the business.
Students may also have difficulty distinguishing between risks they can anticipate, consequences they can reasonably predict, and outcomes that remain uncertain.
Intended Learning Outcome
Students will be able to analyze an interconnected supply chain, identify potential operational vulnerabilities, evaluate the consequences of possible disruptions, and recommend improvements that balance reliability with organizational priorities.
Thinking Students Practice
Primary Capacity: Thinking Under Uncertainty
Students anticipate potential disruptions, consider incomplete information, and evaluate how different situations could affect operations without knowing which problems will actually occur.
Secondary Capacity: Judgment
Students weigh competing priorities and justify improvements that balance reliability, cost, product quality, and customer expectations.
Secondary Capacity: Sensemaking
Students examine relationships among sourcing, production, inventory, and distribution to understand how a disruption in one area may affect the entire operation.
The Learning Activity
Students examine the supply chain of a fictional company producing fresh pasta with a limited shelf life.
The company emphasizes quality, freshness, and rapid delivery. However, maintaining these commitments requires coordinating several closely connected operations.
Students identify how the system works and examine what might happen when an unexpected disruption occurs.
They evaluate risks involving ingredient availability, refrigeration, production capacity, and transportation.
Students then recommend changes designed to make the business more resilient without undermining the qualities that distinguish its products.
The emphasis is on anticipating possibilities, considering trade-offs, and making reasonable decisions when future conditions cannot be predicted with certainty.
Try This With Your Students
Can Verde Pasta Co. Keep Its Promise?
The Scenario
Verde Pasta Co. is a fictional business that produces handcrafted, preservative-free fresh pasta.
Its promise to customers is to deliver freshly made pasta to retail partners within 24 hours of production.
Verde purchases organic semolina flour from three small family farms located within 50 miles of its central kitchen.
Because its pasta contains no artificial preservatives, the finished product has a shelf life of only five days.
The company packages its pasta in compostable paper cartons and distributes it using refrigerated delivery vehicles to grocery stores across three neighboring states.
Verde has limited refrigerated storage space and operates on a daily production schedule, making only the amount of pasta ordered for the following day's deliveries.
This approach helps the company maintain freshness and reduce unsold inventory.
However, it also means that disruptions could affect the company's ability to fulfill customer orders.
Your Challenge
Step 1: Understand the Supply Chain
Identify the major stages of Verde's operation:
Obtaining ingredients
Producing fresh pasta
Packaging finished products
Storing and transporting orders
Delivering products to retail partners
Explain how these stages depend on one another.
Step 2: Identify Potential Risks
Consider the following situations:
Heavy rainfall damages crops at one of Verde's supplying farms.
A refrigerated delivery vehicle breaks down during a scheduled delivery.
A major grocery customer unexpectedly increases its order.
A refrigeration system at the production facility stops working.
For each situation, identify the likely consequences for Verde's operations.
Which risks could have the greatest impact on the company's promise of freshness and rapid delivery?
Step 3: Examine What Remains Uncertain
Choose two potential disruptions and consider:
What information would you need to estimate how serious the problem might become?
What factors could make the consequences better or worse?
How might the disruption affect other parts of the supply chain?
What assumptions are you making about the company's ability to respond?
Step 4: Recommend Improvements
Propose one or two changes that could help Verde manage future disruptions.
Possible areas to investigate include supplier arrangements, emergency refrigeration, delivery planning, or production capacity.
Explain how your recommendations might improve reliability.
Step 5: Consider the Trade-Offs
Evaluate how your proposed changes might affect:
Operating costs
Product freshness
Environmental commitments
Customer expectations
Production efficiency
Could an improvement in one area create difficulties elsewhere?
Share Your Thinking
Prepare a brief recommendation for Verde's leadership that includes:
The two most significant risks you identified.
Why those risks concern you.
Your recommended improvements.
The trade-offs associated with your recommendations.
One important uncertainty you would investigate before implementing your plan.
Remember: The goal is not to predict exactly what will happen. It is to anticipate reasonable possibilities, recognize uncertainty, and make thoughtful decisions that help the business respond when conditions change.
Making Student Thinking Visible
Students produce a supply chain risk analysis and a justified recommendation.
The instructor evaluates whether students recognize relationships among different operational components and can explain how disruptions might create consequences throughout the system.
Evidence of thinking under uncertainty appears in students' ability to identify plausible risks, distinguish between known information and assumptions, and recognize what additional information would help guide decisions.
Students demonstrate judgment by comparing potential responses, considering trade-offs, and explaining why their recommendations are appropriate.
The quality of reasoning matters more than selecting a particular operational solution.
Adapt This Scenario
The underlying instructional approach asks students to examine an interconnected system, anticipate potential disruptions, and develop responses that account for uncertainty and competing priorities.
Healthcare: Students investigate how staffing shortages, equipment failures, or supply interruptions could affect patient-care services and recommend contingency plans.
Information Technology: Students examine a network or technical service and anticipate how component failures, increased demand, or unexpected outages might affect operations.
Education: Students evaluate how changes in enrollment, instructional resources, or student-support availability could disrupt a learning program.
Environmental Science: Students examine how changes in weather, resource availability, or environmental conditions could affect a managed ecosystem or resource system.
Across disciplines, students practice considering how systems respond to changing conditions and making decisions without assuming that everything will proceed as expected.
Original AI Prompt and Faculty Revisions
The original faculty prompt asked an AI system to generate five supply chain scenarios for students in grades 10–12.
Each scenario was required to present a business with a distinctive value proposition and allow students to identify supply chain components, anticipate risks, and recommend improvements supported by reasoning.
Verde Pasta Co. was one of the five fictional businesses generated.
The original scenario described a company producing handcrafted, preservative-free fresh pasta using ingredients sourced from nearby family farms.
The company relied on refrigerated distribution, limited storage capacity, and a daily production system to support its promise of freshness and rapid delivery.
The original student questions focused on identifying supply chain stages, evaluating how the system supported the company's value proposition, anticipating predictable risks, and recommending changes that improved resilience without compromising product quality.
This library version preserves those central elements while expanding the emphasis on thinking under uncertainty.
The specific disruption examples, questions about missing information, and explicit consideration of assumptions are additions developed for the library.
The original contribution does not document subsequent faculty revisions or classroom implementation.